The Nightingale's Song in and out of Poetry
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‘Darkling I Listen’: The Nightingale’s Song In and Out of Poetry Catherine Addison Abstract The nightingale is a common non-endangered species of songbird found almost throughout Europe and Asia, where it has from time immemorial been regarded as the maestro of bird composition and performance. It has come to signify not music so much as poetry, especially love poetry and, of course, love itself. Although in fact only the male of the species sings, the mythology surrounding nightingales styles the singer as female; and, although most people listening to the actual sound of nightingale song would describe it as joyful, its cultural meaning is usually tragic. Both the Greek myth of Philomela and the Persian legend of the nightingale in love with the rose underpin the image of a sad female nightingale. This essay examines the nightingale’s appearances in English poetry, both in the traditional sad female role and its occasional joyful male representation, and it tries to account for the anomaly of these two contradictory images while at the same time taking into consideration the actual sounds of the wild bird and their meanings within the larger context of the ecosystem. Key Words: Nightingale, birdsong, bird poetry, Philomela, zoomusicology. Introduction The nightingale, a bird that we do not hear singing in southern Africa, is nevertheless a heavily encoded sign for all of us who speak and read English—as it is for people who participate in almost every other European Alternation 16,2 (2009) 190 - 220 ISSN 1023-1757 190 … The Nightingale’s Song In and Out of Poetry and Asian culture. Its song is associated with poetry, love, beauty, melancholy, spring ebullience and the suffering artist or lover, together with other, often contradictory meanings. It is the national bird of both Iran and Bangladesh and appears in the literature of almost every country ‘from Japan to the Iberian Peninsula’ (Hatto 1965:792-793). In Greek the word ‘aedon’ denotes not only ‘nightingale’ but ‘poet’ and ‘poem’ as well (Williams 1997:20). The old Persian legend of the nightingale in love with the rose and the ancient Greek myth of Philomela recur endlessly in the literature of other and later cultures. So overlaid with cultural meanings is this nondescript little passerine bird that many writers seem unable to hear its actual song at all. This essay represents an attempt to disentangle the mythology from the reality of nightingale song, paying attention to the phenomenon of its sound, to relevant discussions in ornithology, ethology and aesthetics, and to literature, mainly English-language poetry. As a South African who has never seen or heard a nightingale in the ‘real’ world, I have been able to encounter several in the ‘virtual’ world of the internet, where good photographs, recordings and videos of the bird are freely available. I am particularly grateful to the anonymous person who posted three long and very clear recordings of nightingale song made in a forest near Cologne, Germany, in 2002, 2003 and 2004, at http://www.freesound.org/packsViewSingle.php?id =455. These recordings have allowed me to some extent, by means of a series of phenomenological epochés, to hear nightingale’s song as a pure sound, as an animal’s mating call, as a musical composition, and as the essence of poetry and love according to literary tradition. Birdsong In the preface to a discussion of nightingale song, an outline of the nature and functions of birdsong in general is relevant. Ornithologists distinguish between bird song and bird calls, the latter being shorter, invariable to parti- cular species, used equally by both sexes, and characterised by very specific meanings, such as ‘danger!’ Bird song is usually performed only by the male of a species and its main purpose is to attract a mate or defend a territory (or both of these functions). Unlike calls, songs are often extremely complex in structure, being in many species of considerable duration and in sound 191 Catherine Addison pattern often using ‘variations on a theme’ rather than simple repetition. Many species are programmed only with the rudiments of the song that they will later sing and must learn nearly all of the rules and possible variations— much, say ornithologists, as human children learn language (Stap 2006:10; Jarvis 2004:266). Individuals of most species develop their own personal variants and local groups follow recognizable dialects. In humans, the relationship between language and music is very close, according to recent discoveries in neuroscience (Patel 2003:678). And, if the resemblance between birdsong and human language is striking, its parallel with human music is even more so. Songbirds use tempo, melodic phrasing, and varied rhythmic effects including accelerando, ritardando, rubato, syncopation, crescendo and diminuendo, ‘just as human composers do’ (Boswall 1983:286; Taylor 2008). They practise as youngsters and gradually elaborate their repertoire, in many species even after the song has achieved its practical end: the attraction of a mate and establishment of a territory. Some contemporary ornithologists, diverging from the strict anti- anthropomorphism of earlier ethology towards what is now, ironically, seen as a less ‘homocentric’ approach, believe that birds actually possess an aesthetic appreciation and take pleasure in their compositions and performances (Weinberger 1996; Taylor 2008; Boswall 1983:287). Songbirds were probably the most sophisticated musicians in the world before mankind acquired the knack—which we may have copied from birds anyway. As early as the first century BC, Lucretius wrote: At liquidas avium voces imitarier ore ante fuit multo quam levia carmina cantu concelebrare homines possent aurisque iuvare. (But imitating with the mouth the liquid notes of birds came long before men were able to repeat smooth songs in melody and please the ear) (Lucretius 1:504, 505). Sir John Hawkins in 1776, specifically agreeing with Lucretius, also claimed that ‘the melody of birds’ gave humankind the raw material of music, furnish[ing] the minds of intelligent creatures with such ideas of 192 … The Nightingale’s Song In and Out of Poetry sound, as time, and the accumulated observation of succeeding ages, could not fail to improve into a system (Hawkins 1963:1.2). Even today musicologists are discovering the traces of birdsong in human composers’ works. According to Sylvia Bowden, in an article published as recently as 2008, Beethoven not only consciously imitated the sounds of cuckoo, quail and nightingale in his ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, but he probably ‘borrowed’ the themes of several other works, including the Fifth Symphony, two piano sonatas and some of the late quartets, from the yellowhammer and the blackbird (2008:25-26). Bowden also speculates that Beethoven tended to use the keys of A and F major in his joyful and ‘smiling’ works because these keys ‘encompass the natural range of the blackbird’, a species ‘whose song is usually interpreted by the human ear as joyful’ (2008:28). The relevant question to ask here is whether birdsong through the ages has influenced human musicians as a ‘found object’ might touch an artist’s sensibilities, or as the masterpiece of a precursor might shape or influence his taste and treatment. Jeffery Boswall, a well-known BBC Natural History personality and ornithologist, phrases the question thus: ‘There is a simple choice: either aesthetics is confined to one species, Homo sapiens, or it isn’t’ (1983:256). Some contemporary, environmentally-aware musicologists make the anti-homocentric choice with overwhelming confidence, carving out a new field of study, called by Dario Martinelli (2008) ‘zoomusicology’1. According to Martinelli, zoomusicology is the study of the ‘aesthetic use of sound communication among animals’ (2008). Martinelli credits François-Bernard Mâche with inventing the discipline in 1983, in his Musique, myth, nature, ou les Dauphins d’Arion (translated in 1992 as Music Myth and Nature). Mâche’s book posits a study called ‘ornitho-musicology’, analyses the structure of birdsong, which it claims to 1 ‘Biomusicology’, another recently delineated field, is similar to ‘zoomusicology’ but takes a more homocentric and a more traditionally scientific approach. ‘Biomusicology’ was defined by Nils L Wallin in 1991 as investigating the origins of music from the evolutionary, neurological and comparative perspectives (see also Brown, Merker and Wallis 2000:5; Arom 2000:28; Bickerton 2000:153-155). 193 Catherine Addison be built on the principle of ‘repetition-transformation’, and states that it is time for humans to ‘begin to speak of animal musics other than with the quotation marks’ (Mâche 1992:114). Poets, of course, have always done this, as will be demonstrated in later parts of this paper. The Nightingale and Its Song And this brings me to the nightingale, whose song, though widely spoken of as music, has, unlike the blackbird’s, not been universally accepted as an outburst of joy. The nightingale is a small, unremarkable, brownish bird belonging to the oscine (songbird) suborder of the passerines (small perching birds). It is a non-endangered species whose summer breeding-grounds extend almost throughout Asia and the warmer parts of Europe. Though it winters in Africa, it does not sing on this continent and so has not, as far as I know, entered African mythology at all. Nor is it known in the Americas, where its absence has been comically noted in poems by Wallace Stevens (1984:30) and John Crowe Ransom (1991:63-64) and its imaginary presence passionately asserted by Jorge Luis Borges (2008). For, almost throughout the Old World, the nightingale’s song has, from time immemorial, been regarded as the most beautiful of all bird-produced sounds—and even as an aesthetic ideal to which human art forms can only aspire. (This perception predates the invention of zoomusicology by millennia.) In listening to the nightingale’s song, I am struck by its incredible variability.